Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Screened
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
Mill Valley Film Festival
MILL VALLEY, Calif. -- South African director David Hickson's "Beat the Drum", a tale of the ravages of the AIDS epidemic in South Africa, features gorgeous scenery, fantastic cinematography by Lance Gewer and an incredible array of great South African faces. At its world premiere during the Mill Valley Film Festival, audiences were enraptured, which bodes well for its potential boxoffice. The film is in Zulu and English and has the potential for greater success than just the art house circuit. But because of American screenwriter W. David McBrayer's rather banal script, the film doesn't succeed so much as art as it does as propaganda.
It's impossible to deny "Drum"'s emotional power, which is heightened even more by McBrayer's choice to focus the movie on a beatific young boy, Musa (Junior Singo). Musa lives in a Zulu village where he's been orphaned by AIDS. The villagers think his family is cursed, so Musa heads for Johannesburg to earn enough money to buy a cow for his foster grandmother and to find his uncle. He encounters Nobe (Owen Sejake), a truck driver who gives Musa a lift. In Jo'burg, as it's referred to, Musa washes car windshields on the streets, grateful when drivers flip him a few coins.
Meanwhile, Nobe argues with his wife, who wants him to wear a condom and asks if he's been promiscuous. He refuses to discuss it. (We know he's been with prostitutes.) In a third story line, Nobe's white boss, Pieter Botha (Clive Scott), owner of a distribution company, chides his lawyer son (Tom Fairfoot), who's more interested in helping out a local orphanage than in making money at his father's business. When his son is hospitalized with full-blown AIDS, Pieter begins to understand his son's life.
McBrayer is attempting something Dickensian with these multiple intertwining story lines, and you might be reminded of "Oliver Twist". But McBrayer and Hickson have no fury fueling their film
there's a curious lack of malice. The land is so picturesque and Musa is so sweet and preternaturally wise that he never seems in any real danger, despite some menacing from a street tough in Jo'burg. (Singo has an amazing face, and the audience melts when he smiles, but for all that, he has no real technique or skill as an actor.) There's no mention at all of how governmental policies contribute to the problem. (A failure of nerve?) And the film's conclusion comes off as sentimental and naive. Dickens' happy endings were hard-earned.
The AIDS deaths that occur in the movie are abstract and antiseptic. There is no sense of the appalling physical ravages of the disease: The extreme wasting, the disfiguring opportunistic diseases -- it just seems like a bad flu. (Whenever anyone coughs in this movie, we're meant to understand they have AIDS.) And the forces that encourage the spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa are all elucidated in the first 15 minutes of the film, so that it feels like a precis of the Time magazine cover article on the subject. This then is the movie's problem: McBrayer and Hickson have made a film about AIDS in Africa, but what they haven't done is people it with compelling, distinctive characters.
BEAT THE DRUM
Z Prods.
Credits:
Director: David Hickson
Screenwriter: W. David McBrayer
Producers: W. David McBrayer, Karen S. Shapiro, Richard Shaw
Director of photography: Lance Gewer
Production designer: Johnny Breedt
Music: Klaus Badelt, Ramin Djawadi
Costume designer: Ruy Filipe
Editor: Mark Winitsky
Cast:
Musa: Junior Singo
Thandi: Dineo Nchabeleng
Nobe: Owen Sejake
Pieter: Clive Scott
Stefan: Tom Fairfoot
Letti: Noluthando Maleka
Running time -- 114 minutes
No MPAA rating...
- 11/12/2003
- The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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